Word: ritt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most effective statement made by The Front comes during the final credits when one learns that the director, Martin Ritt, the writer, Walter Bernstein, Mostel, Bernardi, and two other actors in the movie were all blacklisted in the early '50s. The real impact of the McCarthy period for a moment slips...
Some interesting and normally intelligent actors are involved in this nonsense. Robert Shaw is the master crook, and Martin Ritt, better known as a director (Hud, Sounder, Conrack), plays the Swiss cop who is his nemesis. Jon Voight plays Ritt's assistant - and unwitting tool - while Jacqueline Bisset does time as lover to both Shaw and Voight. Their skills are all frittered aimlessly away in a movie that offers slowness of pace as an earnest of artistic integrity. The only emotion that the audience is likely to work up watching this unconscionable bore is an irresistible desire...
Woody Allen and Zero Mostel playing it straight? Director Martin Ritt (Sounder, Hud) has unsmilingly cast the two in Columbia Pictures' The Front, a drama about Hollywood blacklisting in the '50s. For Mostel it's all bitter experience, for he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and scorned by movie producers for a decade. For Allen, playing a bookie who lets a blacklisted writer use his name, drama is all new, and he claims to be, as usual, nervous. "I can't guarantee the outcome," he says...
...world beyond Yamacraw--before he is fired. She dunned some of the film's simplifications but saluted its spirit. Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic, applauded the film as entertainment, though he scored its faults more heavily than Kael; he singled out Jon Voight's performance and Martin Ritt's tactful, sympathetic direction, and noted that if the film relies on sentiment, organic, well-dramatized sentiment is always justifiable...
...film does have problems. But they have little to do with race, liberality or mushiness. Ritt, Ravetch and Frank revel in the grotesque. The school superintendent and principal (glosses of groups of figures from Conroy's book) are educational Bull Connors. More interesting characters, like the island's hermit Mad Billie, and a fast-talking island slicker named Quickfellow, have neither history nor room for growth. The filmmakers also fail to develop some intriguing themes: Conroy must have influenced his children's lives beyond the classroom, but when their usually stand-offish parents strike to protest Conroy's dismissal, there...